China Environmental Protection Foundation and Yuanyuan Industrial Co sign a contract to further promote clothes recycling in Shanghai. From left to right: Xu Guang, secretary general of the foundation, Yang Jiansheng, director of the foundation's Shanghai office, Li Chengfeng, publicity director of the foundation, Yang Yinghong, general manager of the company and Fang Fang, deputy director of the Shanghai Environmental Protection Bureau.

Twenty-five companies and organizations were honored for their role in promoting environmental sustainability at the Green Supply Chain 2018 Shanghai Summit yesterday.

About 150 representatives from enterprises, associations and officials from related government departments attended the summit, which was jointly organized by Shanghai Society of Environmental Sciences, Shanghai Association of Enterprises with Foreign Investment and Shanghai Daily.

The winners included three logistic companies which uses packages made of biodegradable materials, recyclable packages and green-friendly transportation vehicles.

One of them was Alibaba's logistics affiliate Cainiao Network, which launched a green initiative in 2016 with the aim of reducing 3.6 million tons of carbon emission and save 1 billion packing boxes in the industry by 2020.

It encouraged e-shop owners to use packages made of biodegradable materials, replaced traditional fuel vehicles with trucks driven by green energy and recycled packing boxes. It also developed an intelligent system to choose the most suitable box size for each package to reduce waste of paper materials.

Similar measures have also been adopted by courier company ZTO Express, another winner at the event, while Deppon Logistics Co was praised for promoting use of retreaded tires for its vehicles.Four companies that provide packing bags and boxes to logistic companies were also among the winners.

Yuanyuan Industrial Co was honored for promoting recycled clothes.

By 2017, it had set up more than 1,750 bins in local communities to collect old clothes. Last year alone, it had collected about 1,700 tons of clothes. Some of them were cleaned and donated to impoverished areas, while others were recycled as textile raw materials.

At the summit, the China Environmental Protection Foundation and Yuanyuan signed a contract to promote the practice further in Shanghai.

Landsea, a Shanghai-based real estate company, joined hand with the Society of Enterprises and Ecology and few others to launch a program in 2016 to promote green materials in the industry. They hope to push their upstream suppliers to cut down on polluting carbon emission and other negative impact on environment.

By the end of last year, 89 real estate companies had joined the program, affecting about 2,000 upstream suppliers.